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Maximising the Effectiveness of a Small Content Budget

For businesses with smaller budgets it is crucial that they make the most of every opportunity to communicate with an audience. From choosing the right, most relevant titles to maximising the reach and effectiveness of the work involved in producing a piece of content making your budget work for you requires skill and expertise.

Planning

You can’t produce the first piece of content that springs to mind. Anything you write needs to be defined by a strategy, taking into account the elements of your business you want to promote and the subsequent search terms and keywords that are associated with them.

This might require a level of research to identify, but you should look to find the questions your potential customers are asking. These might identify problems customers are looking for answers to. This is where a well produced piece of content answering the question and positioning your business as the solution can reap rewards.

Planning can give you an edge, helping you to identify audiences and opportunities to enhance the reach of your brand online. Doing this can help you avoid wasting budget on pieces that are irrelevant or ineffective, ensuring budget isn’t wasted.

Execution

With an area to target and a question to answer defined you move onto the content creation itself.

As we’ve mentioned your aim is to answer a question for an audience and present your brand as being perfectly suited to offer the solution to a problem. How you go about this can to a degree be defined by your budget.

Smaller budgets might mean that video and animation as options aren’t possible; you might need to work purely with blog posts.

If this is the case there are a number of ways to maximise the value you get from that piece of content.

Write something ‘evergreen’ – that is to say something that won’t necessarily become dated quickly, meaning it can be shared repeatedly over time.

Write in a way that isn’t salesy – if you are providing the answer to a question do this before trying to sell to an audience. Getting this the wrong way round can feel overly pushy and off-putting to a reader.

When you are researching it is very easy to get carried away, trying to include everything can cause writing time to spiral out of control and go over budget. Instead be incredibly focussed but retain any additional sources or information for use on another piece of content – saving time when producing further work later on.

You should also have a clear plan in mind for how a piece is going to be shared. Is it an on page piece that readers are directed to via social media? If so you need to consider how best to maximise the reach and engagement the piece will get. You want as many people as possible to read it, so look at the methods available to you in order to increase the reach of your content.

Refinement

Once a piece of content has gone live what follows should be a degree of analysis.

This helps you assess performance and refine processes going forward. For example you might notice that the content you shared didn’t gain as much traction as other social posts. This could be due to the times they were posted. Meaning that the next time a piece of content is produced you can adjust the times you post links to it in order to try and gain increased reach and impressions.

Taking the time to analyse content means you can look at what is and isn’t working in terms of topics, sharing and tone. Giving you the ability to continue to refine and plan and most importantly improve the content you produce.

Maximising the effectiveness of a budget essentially comes down to effective planning. Ensuring you decide on content of relevance and share it online at times where it will have the most impact, giving you the maximum amount of impressions and potential engagement.

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About Small Business Can

The idea for Small Business Can comes from an Ulster Bank initiative when we went and talked to hundreds of businesspeople and asked them about the types of business supports they most valued. The majority said that they valued the insights of other businesspeople the most. We came up with smallbusinesscan.com, a site run by businesspeople for businesspeople. Read more...